##  Author: Kiril Boyanov (kirilboyanov [at] gmail.com)
##  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/kirilboyanov/
##  Last update: 2023-12-08


In this file, we take a look at the current state of happiness as well as what happiness looked like in the past and how much development has taken place since the base year. We look at both world happiness as well as at happiness by country and region. Finally, we explore whether happiness is rather stable or rather dynamic.


Setting things up

Importing relevant packages, defining custom functions, specifying local folders etc.

# Importing relevant packages

# For general data-related tasks
library(plyr)
library(tidyverse)
library(data.table)
library(openxlsx)
library(readxl)
library(arrow)
library(zoo)

# For working with countries
library(countrycode)

# For data visualization
library(ggplot2)
library(plotly)
library(rjson)


User input

Throughout the analysis, we will be using a common BaseYear (to represent the past state of happiness) and a common ReferenceYear (to represent the most recent state of happiness). To ensure consistency across files, these two years are stored in a TXT file, which is imported below.

Thus, we use the following years as base and reference:

## Base year:  2005
## Reference year:  2022


Importing data

We import data that was already pre-processed in the WHR_data_prep.Rmd notebook. In here, we only use annual happiness data at the country level, a preview of which is shown below:


Definitions

Happiness (subjective well-being)

The authors of the World Happiness Report specify that their measure of happiness is based on the following three measures collected via a survey and then weighted so that a national average can be constructed:

  • Life evaluations: respondents are asked to evaluate their current life as a whole using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and worst possible as a 0. Country rankings are based on 3-year moving averages.

  • Positive emotions: an average of three “Yes” or “No” questions about whether the respondents have experienced the following emotions on the previous day: laughter, enjoyment and learning or doing something interesting.

  • Negative emotions: an average of three “Yes” or “No” questions about whether the respondents have experienced the following emotions on the previous day: worry, sadness and anger.

For more information on the happiness metrics, please refer to the report itself.


The current state of happiness

We start out by exploring the current state of happiness as of the chosen ReferenceYear:

## [1] 2022


Top 10 happiest countries

First, we would like to see what the happiest countries are based on their latest annual scores:

For those who have followed the news, it’s no surprise that the top positions are held by the Nordic countries as well as other fairly well-developed countries. In fact, 8 out of the 10 happiest countries are European, with the remaining two also having significant European heritage.


The 10 least happy countries

Looking at the least happy countries, the findings are not surprising either:

Among these less fortunate cases, we found countries that have been in the news because of ongoing military conflicts and countries which we associated with being less well-off. Overall, 8 out of the 10 least happy countries are located in Africa, with the remaining two countries being located in the Middle East.


Happiness around the world

To be better able to compare happiness across the globe, we will start by using an interactive color-coded world map where each country will get its own happiness score plotted with a different color shade. Unfortunately, we do not have data for all countries, so some states will be colored white due to missing observations.

The map above reveals an apparent happiness division between the Global North and the Global South, though with some exceptions. In the Global South, countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Thailand seem to be happier than their neighbors. In the Global North, Ukraine and the Balkans stand out as being less happy than their neighbors.

To better understand how happiness varies around the world, we take a look at some descriptive statistics for the various regions (countries are grouped together based on the World Bank’s definition):

As expected, more well-off regions such as North America and Europe and Central Asia appear on top of the results with a mean happiness score of 7 and 6.26 respectively. Meanwhile, less well-off regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia appear at the bottom, with scores of 4.48 and 4.27 respectively. To put this another way, people living in South Asia are only 39 p.p. less happier than people living in North America (disregarding the presence of missing values for some countries).


The past state of happiness

Looking into the past, we explore the state of happiness as of our BaseYear:

## [1] 2005


Top 10 happiest countries

Looking back in time, we’re not surprised to see several Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden among the top 10 happiest nations. Curiously though, the happiest countries in the past also include two countries from the Global South (Venezuela and Saudi Arabia), whose scores have deteriorated significantly in the meantime (more on this later).

The list of top 10 happiest countries was much more diverse in the past, with only 6 countries on the list being European (compare to 8 in the reference year).


The 10 least happy countries

Looking at the least happy countries in the past, the findings reveal the presence of states from both the Global North and the Global South:

Unlike the case in our reference year, where we have no European countries on the list of the least happy ones, in the past, as many as 4 out of 10 entries were held by nations from The Old Continent.


The evolution of happiness over time

The charts above beg questions such as:

Below, we’ll explore the data to try and find some answers to these questions.


What happened to the formerly happiest countries?

To answer this question, we can take a look at the development of their happiness score throughout time, which presents us with three conclusions:

  1. Most of the happiest countries in the base year retained relatively similar scores throughout time.
  2. However, we can see a slight decline among these nations which applies specifically to European countries.
  3. The only country to experience a major drop in happiness is Venezuela, where the economic and political circumstances have taken a turn for the worse.


What happened to the formerly least happy countries?

Looking at how the situation unfolded among the least happy countries in our base year, we arrive at a set of similar conclusions:

  1. Most of the least happy countries in the base year retained relatively similar scores throughout time, though the changes in here were more noticeable than in the case of the happiest countries.
  2. Some of the formerly least happy countries experienced a significant improvement in their score across time (Romania and Hungary, which are both located in Europe).
  3. Others experienced a significant decline in their score across time (Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, which are all located in the Middle East).


How did happiness evolve around the world?

Regional developments

To answer this question, we take a look at how the happiness score changed across the world:

Unfortunately, global happiness has decreased by 13.8% in the period 2005-2022. The largest decline is observed in South Asia (-18.4%), while the smallest decline is seen in Europe and Central Asia (-4%). The only region that experienced an increase in happiness was Sub-Saharan Africa (+10%), however, that region still remains at the bottom of the list.

With these numbers, we can reasonably conclude that the world is not automatically becoming a happier place with time and that we may need to put an active effort if we want the planet to be populated by happier people.

Note: due to missing data for Sub-Saharan Africa for 2005, we use 2006 as the base year for that particular region.


Country-level developments: winners and losers

It is also relevant to take a look at the countries that experienced the biggest gains and drops in happiness from the earliest year they have data on until the reference year of our analysis (we refer to them as the winners and losers). The chart below shows the top 10 biggest winners and losers in terms of happiness change across time:

Looking at the chart above, we can see that the countries where happiness increased the most were Bulgaria, Benin and Liberia (a jump of 38.4-39.7%), while the countries where happiness decreased the most were Lebanon, Afghanistan and Jordan (a drop of 34-46.2%). In all of these cases, the country-level change is a lot larger than the global change, which is a decline in happiness of 13.8%.


How stable was the state of happiness throughout time?

While the development between two specific points in time could be a good indicator of long-term progress, the happiness scores in any particular year could be affected by temporary recent events such as e.g. an economic slowdown, a natural disaster etc. Therefore, it makes sense to take a look at how stable the happiness scores were across time, both at the country and at the regional level.


The countries with the most stable scores

One way of evaluating how stable happiness scores were is to look at the standard deviation of the score relative to its mean value. Another way would be to look at how far the minimum and maximum scores are from the average score. The top 10 most stable countries have annual scores that all fall in the range of 1.8-5.5% from the average score; indeed, the box plot and the line charts below show how little the happiness scores have evolved in these ten countries:

While the majority of the countries that have a relatively stable score across time are of Western descent or otherwise well-developed (Hong Kong), we also have Sudan in here as the only country with a relatively stable but low happiness score.


The countries with the least stable scores

Moving on to the 10 countries with the least stable happiness scores, we are immediately struck by the fact that their annual scores can be anywhere between 20.4-52.2% off from their average score in the period, a variation much greater than the one we saw in the most stable countries. Looking at the states included in here, we notice the presence of countries that have experienced significant economic turmoil and/or military conflicts such as Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and Venezuela, with the latter being the only one on the list has had a relatively high happiness score at some point in time.


Most and least stable scoring countries relative to the global average

To make the comparison even more striking, we can take a look at how the 10 most & least stable countries developed across time both compared to each other and compared to the global average. To make interpretation easier, all scores are indexed based on the earliest available score for each country, which is assigned the value of 100:

From the chart, we can see that global happiness suffered a decline in 2006, after which point it started on a path of recovery, though it never reached its 2005 level. The 10 most stable countries also experienced a downturn but a much lower one and remained at almost their original levels. Meanwhile, the 10 least stable countries experienced a series of ups and downs and the overall trend of their development remains unclear.


What about all the other countries?

To be able to explore how stable happiness was by country level, we create an interactive world map where we plot the standard deviation relative to the mean (measured in %) for each individual country. Beware that higher values represent higher instability of happiness over time:

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'CountryCode'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.

From this world map, we gather that happiness is more stable in well-developed countries in the Global North (though perhaps less so in former members of the East Bloc in Europe). Less stability is seen in the Global South in general, though with some exceptions like South-East Asia (but not India) and South America (but not Venezuela). Still, considerable variation remains even between countries belonging to roughly the same geographical region.


Developments at the regional level

Finally, we take a look at what the distribution of the average happiness score looked in the various regions of the world. In here, we’re not as interested in exploring trends or development over time but rather the stability of the scores (how far individual values are from the average), so we make another box plot:

In the above chart, we can see that there are regions like East Asia & Pacific where the scores remained relatively stable (except for some outliers) as well as regions that saw a much greater deal of variation like Europe & Central Asia. We can conclude that the although the global happiness trend points downwards, the world moves at different paces, with some countries and regions experiencing relatively stable happiness (or lack thereof) across time and others undergoing much more dynamic changes (for the better or worse).


Conclusion & key take-outs

In this report, we’ve looked at both the current and the past state of happiness around the world. We’ve examined both individual countries and regions to see which places are the happiest and to find out how stable happiness is throughout time.

Through our inferential analysis, we’ve learned that: